The Labour Humanist

Lovely old, funky old Denmark

Denmark - recently ranked as leading the world in social progress - is where only 2% attend a church regularly, and as this Washington Post feature says

"U.S. Ambassador James P. Cain said that he and his family wanted to go to church shortly after they arrived in Denmark in the summer of 2005. But when they turned up for a scheduled Sunday service at a Danish Lutheran church, they found the door chained and padlocked. The next week, he said, they tried a different Lutheran church, where the entire attendance at the service was nine people -- his family and bodyguards, plus two Danes."

So it's another good news story! The story is a confirmation of the ongoing and massive decline in organised religion in Northern Europe, that the minority of thriving churches are often based around groups of recent immigrants, and that there are no social problems arising out of the decline of Christianity - we can easily live without it. The story tries to spin the immigrant congregations as a sign of some kind of revival.

But, when are people looking into the concept of community cohesion going accept evidence, such as the situation in the most advanced nations on Earth, that stable communities and rising quality of life do NOT need the input of faith groups or need the so-called "social capital" of faith adherents?

Now the bishops are bashing Radio 1

Here we go, now the churches want to tell BBC Radio 1 what it should broadcast, and no they're not calling for more garage punk or dancehall on the nation's most popular music station. The Independent reports that catholic and anglican bishops want Radio 1 to broadcast more...drum roll...religious output...there's a surprise.

What made me laugh, aside from the bare faced cheek of it all, was the claim that religion played a "major part" in the life of our youth and that they had a "thirst for spiritual input".

Let's do some fact checking on this claim. First let's see what kind of thirst for religious broadcasting exists amongst the nation's youth. How about TV viewing data? Ofcom's annual review of UK broadcasting tells us on page 94 that people aged 16-24 watched on average 1.1 hours of religious programmes on TV. Is that 1.1 hours a week? A month? Every three months? No that would be 1.1 hours during the whole of the year. Wow, an insatiable thirst there don't you think!

Ok what about the claim that religion played a "major part" in the lives of young people?  let's be generous why not refer to the findings of the church's own inquiry into the "spirituality" of youth called Making Sense of Generation Y. In the report John Sentamu - the Archbishop of York no less - said:

“The research suggests young people are happy with life as it is, that they have felt no need for a transcendent something else and regard the Church as boring and irrelevant.”

The report also found:

“...the data indicated that they found meaning and significance in the reality of everyday life, which the popular arts helped them to understand and imbibe.”

So there you go, young people don't choose to watch religious broadcasting and the church's own research says they find the church "boring and irrelevant". But hey, who expects religious leaders to keep to the facts when they are involved in a bit of blatant lobbying for ever more special privileges and subsidies?

As naturalyoghurt puts it: "I know the church has problems recruiting believers to their fantasy beliefs but if they want to get media bandwidth they should have to pay for it like any other single issue group."

Three reasons to be cheerful: Religion in decline in the USA, Mexico and Germany

Good news comes in threes, or something like that. But three fresh reasons to be cheerful from new stories in the last 24 hours charting the decline of religion in the USA, Germany and Mexico.

First we learn that Hispanic Americans are abandoning religion. This is the headline in the New York Times to a story which charts the various ways in which Hispanics are leaving religion, including the fact that the number of Hispanic Americans who identify themselves as having no religion has more than doubled between 1990 and 2001.

Then we have the Catholic church in Germany which has lost nearly 700,000 followers who de-registered themselves as Catholic between 2000 and 2005 - and guess what, every time the German Pope Benedict visits Bavaria - there has been a dramatic rise in the number of departures from the church!

But the protestants in Germany don't have much to shout about as they are predicting their church membership to dramatically shrink to just one third of today's figure by the year 2030.

And then this article from Mexidata that concludes that the Catholic Church is in decline in Mexico:

"...the Church in Mexico has been damaged by a series of sex scandals. Cardinal Rivera has faced charges that he protected child-molesting priest Nicolas Aguilar and encouraged his victims to forget about what had happened to them. As awful as that sordid affair is, probably more significant for the Church’s declining authority is that it has simply been overtaken by a society that grows more intellectually independent and secular with each day."

New church research concludes Britain has a "secular majority" - (not that you will find any mention in the official press release)

A new report by Tearfund - a Christian agency - into churchgoing in the UK concludes there is a "secular majority" in the UK, but they decided to omit this finding from their press release for the report.

The report's executive summary states:

"Two thirds of UK adults (66%) or 32.2 million people have no connection with church at present (nor with another religion). These people are evenly divided between those who have been in the past but have since left (16 million) and those who have never been in their lives (16.2 million). This secular majority presents a major challenge to churches. Most of them - 29.3 million - are unreceptive and closed to attending church; churchgoing is simply not on their agenda."

The research was designed and conducted by a Christian group, so it's probably safe to assume that if any manipulation took place it would have been to boost the Christian figures rather than the reverse.

The survey claims 53% of the UK population claims to be "Christian". This is way down on the 72% figure from the 2001 Census. Does this mean there has been collapse in Christian belief in the last 6 years? This is unlikely, although we should expect to see a steady and continuing decline. No, it's probably got more do with this survey being a better method for finding out about people's beliefs than the Census question on religion which is critically flawed and needs to be dropped by Office for National Statistics.

Here is the summary table of adult responses to the main question in the survey:

From the table we can see that only a minority of people aged under 45 are Christian and that a majoirty of all people aged under 35 have no religion. So unless there are mass conversions, in the future Britain is on course to be firmly secular with a small minority practising religion, mostly comprised of those in later life, those recently arrived from countries with higher levels of religiosity and other non-Christian religions.

The report also estimates 10% of the population attend a church weekly rising to 15% who attend at least monthly. This puts active, practising Christians as a small minority of the UK population. This could and should have implications for the conduct of public policy in the UK as it makes no sense to privilege such as small group over the rest of us.

The Tearfund press release tries to be as upbeat as possible with its language of "encouragement" and "opportunity", and makes no mention of the "secular majority" conclusion from the report. There's nothing to stop any organisation putting a positive gloss on anything they publish, and we would expect any lobby group to do so, but we should also expect that other voices, including this blog, will look behind the headlines and point out any spinning the facts that might be taken place.

It's a report rich in data so may return to this again in the near future.

Why Europe will continue on its secular path and become "'post-Christian"

A-list political scientists Pippa Norris and Robert Inglehart have produced a fascinating account of the factors which transform societies from mass belief in religion towards a secular majority - and in the process attempt to explain why the USA has been the exception to this rule.

The article is published in the latest edition of Free Inquiry. While Europe and the USA differ in significant ways, with Europe heading towards a "post-Christian" society in only a few generations time, the trend in both continents is towards secularisation and more diversity. Norris and Inglehart recognise the challenge to the straight line of secularisation presented by continuing religiosity in the US, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the expansion of new age beliefs in Europe.  So, is it time to bury the assumption of continued secularisation?  This article argues an emphatic no:

"The critique relies too heavily on selected anomalies and focuses too heavily on the United States (which happens to be a striking deviant case) rather than comparing systematic evidence across a broad range of rich and poor societies. We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feelings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key factor driving religiosity, and we demonstrate that the process of secularization—a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs—has occurred most clearly among the most prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial nations.

Secularization is a tendency, not an iron law...But when we go beyond anecdotal evidence, we find that the overwhelming bulk of evidence points in the opposite direction: people who experience ego-tropic risks during their formative years (posing direct threats to themselves and their families) or socio-tropic risks (threatening their community) tend to be far more religious than those who grow up under safer, more comfortable, and more predictable conditions. In relatively secure societies, the remnants of religion have not died away, but the importance and vitality of religion, its ever-present influence on how people live their daily lives, has gradually eroded.

It is this point about individual and community insecurity that leads them to their explanation of the US exception:

"The strongest challenge to secularization theory arises from American observers who commonly point out that claims of steadily diminishing congregations in Western Europe are sharply at odds with U.S. trends, at least until the early 1990s. Here we focus upon how we can best explain “American exceptionalism.”...Evidence in Western Europe consistently and unequivocally shows two things: traditional religious beliefs and involvement in institutionalized religion, first, vary considerably from one country to another; and, second, have steadily declined throughout Western Europe, particularly since the 1960s. Studies have often reported that many Western Euro¬peans have ceased to be regular churchgoers today outside of special occasions such as Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, a pattern especially evident among the young.

Trends in recent decades illustrate the consistency of the secularization process irrespective of the particular indicator or survey that is selected. All the trends point consistently downward. Moreover, the erosion of religiosity is not exclusive to Western European nations; regular churchgoing also dropped during the last two decades in affluent Anglo-American nations such as Canada and Australia. One reason for the decline in religious participation during the late twentieth century lies in the fact that during these years many common spiritual beliefs have indeed suffered considerable erosion in post-industrial societies.

Among post-industrial societies, the United States is the exception in its combination of high rates of religious pluralism and participation: the theory does indeed fit the American case, but the problem is that it fails to work elsewhere. What matters for the societal vulnerability, insecurity, and risk that we believe drives religiosity are not simply levels of national economic resources but their distribution as well.

Yet the level of economic inequality proves strongly and significantly related to both forms of religious behavior, but especially to the propensity to engage in individual religiosity through prayer....the United States is exceptionally high in religiosity in large part, we believe, because it is also one of the most unequal post-industrial societies under comparison.

Despite private affluence for the well-off, many American families, even in the professional middle classes, face serious risks of loss of paid work by the main breadwinner, the dangers of sudden ill health without adequate private medical insurance, vulnerability to becoming a victim of crime, as well as the problems of paying for long-term care of the elderly. Americans face greater anxieties than citizens in other advanced industrialized countries about whether or not they will be covered by medical insurance, be fired arbitrarily, or be forced to choose between losing their jobs and devoting themselves to their newborn children. The entrepreneurial culture and the emphasis on personal responsibility has generated conditions of individual freedom and delivered considerable societal affluence, and yet one trade-off is that the United States has greater income inequality than any other advanced industrial democracy. By comparison, despite recent pressures on restructuring, the secular Scandinavian and West European states remain some of the most egalitarian societies, with relatively high levels of personal taxation but also an expansive array of welfare services in the public sector, including comprehensive healthcare, social services, and pensions.

Growing up in societies in which survival is uncertain is conducive to a strong emphasis on religion; conversely, experiencing high levels of existential security throughout one’s formative years reduces the subjective importance of religion in one’s life. As a society moves past the early stages of industrialization and life becomes less nasty, less brutish, and longer, people tend to become more secular in their orientations. The most crucial explanatory variables are those that differentiate between vulnerable societies and societies in which survival is so secure that people take it for granted during their formative years."

They conclude with a warning note about the implications of a world divided by "sacred" and secular societies growing further apart:

"Thus, while economic development brings systematic changes, a society’s cultural heritage continues to influence cultural direction. While secularization started earliest and has moved farthest in the most economically developed countries, little or no secularization has taken place in the low-income countries, meaning that the cultural differences linked with economic development not only are not shrinking, but are growing larger. This expanding gap between sacred and secular societies around the globe has important consequences for our current religious and political landscapes, our cultural change, and our new forms of identity politics."

How a country can leap forward when it abandons religion

"...Spain´s abandonment of religion has been accompanied by decades of tremendous economic and social development. Spain is now 10 times richer per capita than it was 3 decades ago. Cultural production is thriving and science which was mostly non existence after centuries of a tough ban on scientific research by the Catholic Church is now beginning to develop with the number of papers written and patents filed growing every year. During the last decade Spain has been the growth engine of the large countries in Europe. Indeed the economy grew so fast that Spain accepted 6% of its population in the form of immigrants in the last 5 years in order to cope with the labor shortages.

If anything, Spain proves that societies do not fall apart when they give up religion and almost everything that was illegal for religious reasons, becomes legal. Moreover I believe that if Spain had not given up on religion it would not have been the success that it is now, as the Catholic Church in Spain was deeply involved in most state activities and acted as a deterrent for progress. For those, mostly in America, who believe that religion somehow makes countries more ethical Spain proves just the opposite. With a good secular and free Kindergarten to University education system Spain has less violent crime, less people in jail and less policemen per inhabitant than mostly religious USA. The key distinction between USA and Spain, or Europe in general, is that while most people in Europe dislike the same activities that people in America dislike but in Europe we don´t ask that what we don´t like be illegal. Moreover in Europe more people behave ethically than in America not because they fear God. Most people behave ethically because they personally believe in doing what is right."

This is from Martin Varsavsky at the Huffington Post and while, of course, we have to agree the decline of the church in Spain been an important factor in the transformation of Spain from backwater to a wonderfully dynamic economy and society, let's not forget this transformation would never have happened without the Spanish people's enthusiastic support for democracy after the Franco years - or should we forget the importance of a series of successful socialist governments and their progressive reforms as well as the hard cash support from the EU. None of this popular with the authoritarian religious right, but it works...and we love Spain!

Thousands to churches to close over the next decade...and the science of smiling

Religious belief in Europe is declining so fast that thousands of churches will have to close over the next decade....hurray! Another good news story! It is predicted that at least another 4,000 churches will close in England over the next 15 years.

Looks like assorted bishops and archbishops are going to need some help in keeping their spirits (sic) up. And so we turn to the latest link added to the blog roll Dr Tempest's Psychiatrist Blog that combines psychiatry, health and politics! Recently the good doctor recommended the clinical benefits of smiling - even when you're feeling down. Although originally posted in response to Tony Blair's problems, I think desperate bishops might also find the advice useful:

"...Did you know that a smile can have a positive effect on one'e mood? Try, for example, pulling the sides of your mouth up in the shape of a smile and holding it for twenty seconds. To the average person this may seem very silly yet often it can tangibly improve one’s mood. Making the shape of a smile uses the muscle groups in your face that connect with a particular pattern of brain activity. Because the brain links these areas, a chain reaction is set up in between the movement of your face muscles and the pattern of activity within your brain. This chain reaction induced is associated with positive happy feelings in your emotional centres. Because cells that ‘wire together fire together’ and by activating the wires that cause a smile, they fire links to positive emotions. So, just by moving your mouth into a smile causes a small increase in positive emotion related brain activity..."

The only rise in church attendance is children dragged along so their parents can get them into a church school

The only apparent statistical blip in the relentless decline in church attendance has been children attending. I was immediately suspicious, but thanks to the Christian think tank Ekklesia for putting those suspicions into words:

"The numbers are boosted by the fact that attendance is required to get children into some church schools.  The increase however was not reflected in the figures for baptism and services of thanksgiving for children which fell 2% and 13% respectively."

So the only "good news" on attendance is a result of social engineering and poor policy making which forces parents - many of whom aren't believers - into pretending to be Christians for a couple of years so they can get their children into a church school because it has better exam results than other schools in the area. If I were a Church of England press officer or Bishop, I wouldn't be proud of that fact, I would be ashamed of the perversity of it all.

New statistics show the continued collapse of church attendance in England (released on the same day as statements on the adoption row in the hope we wouldn’t notice??)

New data released this week shows further sharp falls in church attendance in England. The figures are compiled by the Church of England who have tried put a desperate spin on what in the cold light of day is very bad news for them. Here’s all the key numbers released this week for attendance in 2005:

• Average Sunday Attendance DOWN 2%
• Average Weekly Attendance DOWN 1%

The old way of measuring attendance which has been used by the Church for a longer period of time is called Usual Sunday Attendance:

• Usual Sunday Attendance DOWN 3% to 881,000.

In 1968 this figure was 1.6million, so on this measure the number of people attending Church on Sunday has halved in the last 37 years. In 1997 the figure was 996,000 which means on this measure the Church of England is losing more than 14,000 Sunday worshippers every year. So, all in all, very this is very encouraging news!

Also:

• Baptisms DOWN 2%
• Thanksgivings DOWN 13%
• Church Funerals DOWN 2%
• Easter Attendance DOWN 6%
• Christmas Attendance UP 6%

Is it too cynical to ask why these figures of further decline in Christianity were released on the same day as the letter from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to Tony Blair on the adoption row. Surely the church wasn’t using the row over adoption agencies to bury bad news, they wouldn’t do that, would they…

Incidentally, if you want to know about spin – about making something bad sound good – without ever going over the line of telling a full blown lie – then read through the CofE press release on the figures and their claim that the data gives a “mixed” picture. Honestly, you could use it on a media studies GCSE as a course material on spin and lobby groups.